"Yoga occurs where two things meet."

- Richard Freeman, Yogi & author

The changes we go through

By Nitin Orayan on 05 November 2012

'Everything has a beginning and an end’ is the simple core principle that rules our lives in this world that we live in. This maxim leads us beautifully into accepting the fact that everything favourable in our lives will not last forever, making us humble; and at the same time we are lead to bear the most difficult times, knowing that they won’t last forever. Either way, change is bound to set in before you know it, ushering a change in your world within and then without.

Most often the change that we look for and patiently wait to manifest in the world outside is disappointing. The world within; an unimaginable cosmos of consciousness is turning tides, constantly dipping us into streams of feeling – from the most pleasurable to the severest unbearable, and also the grays in between the polarities, on our structures and sub-structures - physical, psychological, energetic, soul…and then that change is subtly but surely concretizing the world outside.
The inside and outside, as we see it, in our perception doesn’t really exist, but the stream of consciousness that flows from the soul precipitates a world of perceptive experience that offers us a ground for further movement and elevation.

A book that found expression through me, in the form of an inspiring novel for the young, called “The Princely Gift” has traveled over wide spaces of my changing perception, coursing little by little written on scraps of paper, as I struggled to keep body and soul together, hardly knowing where my sun would rise the next morning. Over twelve long years this story moved with my shifting awareness, a line or two adding to the day’s uncertainty, and I having learnt the lesson of my life surely.
It was only when I finally got my chance to settle down in the quiet belonging space of a village, near a pilgrim’s haven named “Ganeshpuri” in Maharashtra, in the year 2004, when the yellowed crumbling scraps of paper opened to a new zeal for completion. Then many forces blew into one purposeful direction witnessing the central characters of the story move to its culmination, in a rhythmic dance of their destinies, in what has been the most fascinating process for me in this lifetime.

It must have been my lifelong compulsion of needing to shrink before something else, bigger or brighter or more profound, which shaped the central character of this book, Abhiman in the body of a deformed human. In this story, Abhiman’s struggle with his own deformity as a young man barely three feet tall, is how most of us, and surely me, live out our inadequacies or inabilities in comparison to something or someone more successful around us. A friend, a brother or sister, a colleague does better in every aspect of life and we find ourselves crammed into a deformity that is only a momentary contraction of our minds and not deserving even a cent more. It takes what it must take for any one of us in this world to realize that everything eventually changes; sometimes the tables turn and life proposes a somersault of formation.

Here, a turn of the friendly card or a beautiful full-bodied sunrise in our faces comes as a Princely Gift and transforms that deformity, lighting up a lamp of brightness, showing us the other side of the world; contraction leading to expansion, like drawing up gallons of fresh air into the lungs and savouring it all, not missing the euphoria for even a 100th of a second. This is something we have come to experience for sure, for the good of our souls, and there is very little more worth in this world other than this process. This is how we elevate to a higher level of awareness through contraction leading to expansion, and our consciousness precipitating to a newer level of perception. And this level of perception that has come to be vibrates from soul to cell, defining the world around us.

Your understanding of who ‘you’ are, in the confines of a limited system of ego identification, can take a break, if you wish it strongly, and make way for the real you, to bob your true head up, out from the pit of the ocean of your being, to gasp in a lungful, and recognize the true nature of life, living a life of celebration…

Excerpted from ‘Author’s Note’ on “The Princely Gift” by Nitin Orayan published in India; for a copy of the book please write to the author at nitinorayan@gmail.com You can read more information about the the authors book here: www.learningspacefoundation.in

About the author

Nitin was raised in Mumbai, India, where he completed his schooling and post-graduate studies in Mass Communications at a reputable institution. From his early days in school, he was drawn to philosophical… Read full bio